The Right is crying again. It appears that the law has hurt Republicans' feelings, and now the customary self-righteous wailing has begun.
Terri Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state (with a cerebral cortex which had liquefied into spinal fluid) for 15 years before her death on Thursday - although religious leaders, Republican politicians, anti-abortion activist doctors, television psychic John Edwards and Mel Gibson disagree. Following years of legal battles, Schiavo's feeding tube was removed. From that moment, a family tragedy became a moral values circus as right wing politicians, conservative Christians, and anti-abortion terrorists preached fire and brimstone against judges who would dare to uphold the law in the face of people holding cardboard signs and praying.
On Palm Sunday, Congress, led by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, showed just how far removed the Republican Party is from rationality when it violated Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution and trampled the Tenth Amendment by granting the federal courts special jurisdiction to hear appeals of the Schiavo case. This act alone should unnerve those Americans who value the rule of law, but what happened over the next few days is truly horrifying.
When the federal courts could find nothing wrong with the decisions made in the Florida courts, Republicans and other right-wing conservatives began to attack the judicial system, claiming that Mrs. Schiavo's right to due process of law was being denied, that the courts, so eager to see her die, were overstretching their authority, that the courts were not obeying Congress, and that the courts were out of step with the American public.
All of these claims, originating as they do from a universe in which it is okay to kill healthy, whole people who do not want to die, but not okay to abort pregnancies or allow terminal patients to die with dignity, are predictably ridiculous.
Terri Schiavo, or more accurately her parents, received more due process of law in a week than most people get in a lifetime. Congressmen and conservative commentators alike have complained that Congress somehow ordered the federal courts to grant a completely new hearing with the full original arguments of the parties presented, and that the courts ignored this order. But as anyone who has read the Constitution knows, Congress cannot order the judiciary to do anything.
The federal courts reviewed Terri Schiavo's parents' appeal just as they would have reviewed any other appeal and found no fault with the original ruling and that no new evidence was likely to be effective in overturning the decision. Twenty-two judges, 13 of them Republicans, did their job, over and over, and yet it was not good enough, because some extremely obnoxious but apparently pious people did not agree with the decision.
Because these people either could not or would not accept that our legal structure had not been formulated with their emotional idiosyncrasies in mind, they began attacking those who had accurately interpreted the law. "Just because there is a judge somewhere in the world who would give an estranged husband like that the time of day tells you how bad the court system is," Jerry Falwell eloquently put it, unwittingly undermining his own arguments in favor of the sanctity of marriage.
Exhibiting absolutely no appreciation for the genius of a judiciary able to interpret law without the fear of popular reprisal, Dr. James Dobson, the man who saved the world from Spongebob Squarepants, had this to say about the judicial system: "They're totally out of control. And there is, you know, almost a feeling of futility when it comes to the courts handing down decisions that contradict the will of the people." He went on to cite, in addition to the Schiavo decisions, the Supreme Court's banning of the execution of minors as an instance of the judicial system's blindness to American values. He understandably did not mention that two-thirds of Americans supported the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube and that only the most morally upright one-quarter of Americans support executing kids.
It is not only these moral patriarchs who condemned the judicial system. Senator Rick Santorum called the court's decision "unconscionable," and Tom DeLay seemed to deal with the guilt that he must feel from having taken his own father off life support in 1988 by going on a rampage against the courts. He referred to an "arrogant and out of control judiciary that thumbs its nose at the President and at Congress," and said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."
It appears that the eminently ethical Mr. DeLay would like Congress to be able make royal proclamations and mandate that judges rubber stamp them or risk some horrible fate, rather than adhere to Constitutional separation of powers and the 202 year old Marbury v. Madison principle of judicial review.
Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, in a comment that is either purposefully misleading or simply stupid, appeared to justify a recent courthouse slaughter by rapist Brian Nichols by saying that "there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence."
Good, qualified judges nominated by both Republicans and Democrats upheld the Constitution in the Schiavo case, and were fiercely attacked by the Right. Because sensible people will never interpret the Constitution the way the Right would like, radical conservatives have determined that they must threaten judges, politically and apparently even with violence. And, as Republican Senators are now trying to do, they have determined to disregard Senate standing rules in order to push extremely radical judges into positions of power. If Democrats cannot stop this gross abuse of power, it will be the first step toward the creation of the Revolutionary Islamic Christian Republic of Iran America.
Steven Ward is a junior majoring in international relations.
